"Excellent Sheep challenges parents to break from the herd mentality."—

Peggy Orenstein, author of Cinderella Ate My Daughter

"Read this book to remember what learning should be, and then pass it along to the next sheep who should leave the flock behind."—

Emily Bazelon, author of Sticks and Stones

"A true teacher speaks here. He has my admiration and my gratitude."—

Leon Wieseltier

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About the Author

William Deresiewicz is an award-winning essayist and critic, a frequent speaker on college campuses, and the author of Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life. He taught at Yale from 1998-2008 and was a graduate instructor at Columbia for five years before that.

His essay “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education” has been viewed over one million times online. “Solitude and Leadership,” an address at West Point, has been taught across the military and corporate worlds.

Bill is a Contributing Writer for The Nation and a Contributing Editor for The American Scholar. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and elsewhere.

Bill has won the Hiett Prize in the Humanities, the Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, and is a three-time National Magazine Award nominee. His work has been translated into fifteen languages and anthologized in over twenty college readers. He is serving as the Mary Routt Chair of Writing at Scripps College during the spring of 2015.